8 Lessons Learned from 10,000 Hours Spent Obsessing Over Product

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes the claim that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert on something. And although plenty of people have written about why Gladwell’s claim may or may not hold up, 10,000 hours is still roughly equivalent to five years of full-time work, if you estimate 40 hours per week over 50 weeks each year.

And if you ask me? That’s easily long enough to go from a beginner to an expert on plenty of different subjects.

I’ve seen the impact of investing 10,000 hours into something new in my own career. After I left Single Grain in 2014, I took a position as the head of marketing at a SaaS company – not only because I wanted to grow the company, but because I wanted to learn everything I could about product.

And although I can’t say I’m truly an “expert” on the subject, I’ve come a long ways over the past five years. Here, I’ll share some of the lessons on successfully growing a product that I’ve learned from that initial role, as well as from all the companies I’ve built or acquired since.

Lesson #1: Customers don’t always know what they want 

Here’s the thing. Customers are really good at giving product feedback – and they’re really good at shitting all over things that don’t work. But that’s not the same as knowing what they actually want.

Let me give you an example. At Pick.co, which my company acquired in 2016, we made it a huge priority to listen directly to customers. From about 2016 to mid-2017, we went out and specifically talked to 50-75 customers about what they wanted.

This gave us some great insight, but the problem was that every customer we talked to was saying something different. They all had different workflows. So when we went out and actually built what they’d said they wanted? We wound up eventually having to scrap pretty much everything we’d created. 

We didn’t realize it at the time, but we were asking the wrong questions. 

Lesson #2: Learn to ask the right questions

One of the biggest challenges in product – especially in SaaS – is that you’re often creating something that’s going to be revolutionary or that requires changing habits.

Think about it. People didn’t use cell phones before they were cell phones, and they didn’t buy on mobile devices before there were people selling on mobile devices.

Sometimes, what you need to build is different than what people are doing now – and that’s what makes asking the right questions so critical when capturing customer feedback. 

Unfortunately, there’s no set of “right questions” out there. It’s more about demonstrating your idea, sharing it, and seeing if it’s valuable enough or if it offers a big enough benefit to get people to change their habits.

At Mailshake, when we talked to customers, we’d hear all sorts of feedback around making the product “easier to use.” But when we dug deeper, customers had dozens of different reasons it was too difficult to use. Looking even more closely, it was clear that people were just failing to use the features we already had in place.

If we’d listened to customers’ prescriptive ideas of what to change, we’d have made the product worse for other users. But by looking at the product in terms of where people were failing, we were able to fix workflows and solve their problems – all without changing the product.  

If you aren’t asking the right questions and digging deeper into the responses you’re receiving, you’re going to miss out on these opportunities.

Lesson #3: Simple products are almost always better than feature-rich products

Here’s a big lesson I learned. There are always ways to iterate products to add functionality and make them more robust. But ultimately, what people crave is something they can jump into and figure out immediately, without having to go through a lot of training or change their behavior. 

So, knowing that, the challenge becomes, “How can I remove friction points in what I need people to do to get started?”

Take Mailshake as an example, again. If you’re going to use the product for sales, you have to know how to write copy, how to find and identify your potential customers, what kind of cadence you’re going to use to follow-up, etc. 

Despite that, we knew we couldn’t make the first thing new users have to do be to go watch a video. They’re not going to watch it. They just need to know the first thing they have to do, and they have to buy into it. After that, they’re more invested, and they’re more likely to do the second thing, and then the third thing, and the fourth thing, and so on.

The same goes for writing email copy. The first thing people have to do with Mailshake is add email addresses and start a campaign. If they can’t write email copy yet, they can use templates or draw on other sources. But if we decided we had to teach everybody how to write copy from day one, they’d become experts in copywriting – but they still wouldn’t be any closer to sending a campaign or getting results. 

As it stands, copywriting feedback is currently several steps into Mailshake’s onboarding process, and that’s by design. We’ve learned that, by that point, they’re invested enough to do the really hard thing in ways they wouldn’t be if we started with that training.

The bottom line? Keep things simple. Focus on the first interaction, and then move on to the second interaction once you’ve nailed that. Keep going, focusing on removing friction along the way. 

Lesson #4: What worked for other companies won’t necessarily work for you

I’m going to be blunt. You could take the exact same steps as Dropbox, but you’re not going to be the next Dropbox. It just doesn’t work that way.

Part of it is timing. Other companies launched at a different time than you. They may have had more users when they launched, or they may have had a lot fewer competitors because of their timing.

Misinformation is a problem as well. No matter how much info a company publishes, you’re never going to fully understand what happened behind the scenes that led to a success. Maybe people misquoted, misread or misinterpreted how valuable something was in a company’s growth. If you try to build your own business based on this misinformation – even if you don’t realize you’re doing it – you’re always going to come up short.

So what do you do instead? Use the lessons from the greats as good inspiration, but find a way to put your own spin on it.

For example, Dropbox’s model may not work the same way anymore, but email optimization startup Superhuman is still making the referral program model work by adding a different hook of personalized onboarding to build up hype.

But even Superhuman’s approach might not work for you. You have to do the math.

For example, say you decide to spend money on PPC. How much traffic will your campaigns generate? How much are they going to cost? What’s going to convert for users, how’s that going to convert to paid and how many users is that going to get you? 

If you decide to focus on SEO instead, know that that’s going to take some time. Even partnerships aren’t guaranteed wins. You have to look at how much traffic they’ll bring in, and how many signups you think you’ll be able to close as a result.

Lesson #5: If you build a good product, it’ll do the marketing for you

If you build the right product, and you find the one or two channels that grow your company, eventually – when you get enough people through the door – going through the flow of your product can become your primary growth driver.

But for that to work, you have to get your first 100-200 people to go through the door.

One way we’ve done that at Mailshake and at a lot of our other companies is to launch a lifetime deal upfront. I’ve heard from people who thought that was diminishing our value. But the way I look at it, we were able to get thousands of people in the door who basically paid me to give me feedback, and who helped kickstart our referral marketing. 

But again, that was 4-5 years ago. Even launching lifetime deals doesn’t work the same way now. You still have to figure out a way to put your own spin on the model.

Lesson #6: The best products become platforms

According to Ajay Agrawal, the difference between products and platforms is that:

• Product = an application to solve a specific problem or use case
• Platform = common infrastructure essential to multiple applications

Ajay offers Salesforce as an example, explaining that, “Salesforce’s core CRM evolved into a broader platform for enterprise applications, helping it become the first dedicated SaaS company with $10 billion in annual revenue.”

That transition didn’t happen overnight for Salesforce – and it won’t happen for you either. But if you can make the leap from product to platform, do so. If you can become a platform, people will never leave. 

Lesson #7: Great products can be hiding behind flawed assumptions

This was a surprising lesson for me. Sometimes, parts of your product can be awesome, but the things that are either in front of it or around it can bring it down. 

Some of you might remember that, when we started Mailshake, it was actually called ContentMarketer.io. Like Mailshake, ContentMarketer offered email sequences, but it also helped you find influencers’ email addresses, find their social profiles, and reach out to them while scanning blog posts.

What happened was that people loved the email sequence part of the tool, but nobody used the other parts. We got lucky that we built one component right from the beginning, but no one ever really used it because the rest of the product wasn’t up to snuff for our customers. It took us about almost a year to figure that out and to change course to building Mailshake.

If you’re struggling to get traction, that doesn’t mean your entire product is flawed. Find out what’s awesome about what you’ve built and focus on it – even if it’s not what you initially imagined customers would value. 

Lesson #8: Product is hard

It’s that simple. There’s no right way to do product, and there’s no easy way to learn it. 

You can read all about product. I’ve read dozens of books on product management, talked to lots and lots of experts, and spent the last five years basically obsessing over product. 

But the reality is, it’s going out and doing it – talking to customers, getting feedback, asking the right questions, and rinsing and repeating this whole thing over and over again – that helps you find your special sauce.

I’m still not an expert, but every year, I moved another notch up until – all of a sudden – the pieces of the puzzle just clicked together and left me with an unofficial product management philosophy I didn’t have before.

Your process will be different. You might only need a few years of boots-on-the-ground experience to master product, or you might need decades. The only real way to know is to get in the arena, get your hands dirty, and treat every experience as an opportunity to learn a new lesson.

What lessons can you add to this list? Leave me a note below sharing your own product management experiences:

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash